Dark and obscure music blog/zine since 2006 [ Post-Industrial / Ambient / IDM ]
contact: woundsoftheearth@gmail.com

| news | reviews | interviews | recommendations | releases | articles | about |

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Osman Arabi - "Beast Mutation Rituals"

Artist: Osman Arabi
Album: Beast Mutation Rituals
Year: 2011
Label: Kalpamantra
Genre: Dark / Ritual Ambient, Experimental
Website: http://kalpamantra.bandcamp.com
this album on discogs: here






 

 



 
Basics:
"Beast Mutation Rituals" is the new release from the fairly prolific Osman Arabi (maybe you know him from his other projects 20.sv, Seeker, Shamanic Death Trance, etc.). This is a single 25 minute ritual of extremely dense, crushing, darkly arcane soundscapes.

Good stuff:
+ This is an INTENSE release. "Beast Mutation Rituals" pummels you with primordial ferocity from start to finish. It reaches it's feral, blackened tendrils down into the the twisting corridors of your subconscious; disassembling every bit of you quark by quark, and, by some ancient design, it reconfigures this slop of minutiae into something infinitely strengthened and more horrible. All this while repetitively beating your higher consciousness into oblivion.  The intensity comes from the quite dense mix; there are many elements at play at all times, with little downtime. There is an ever-present bed of thick, black, droning ambience, and over top of this foundation is a continuously evolving mixture of sparse, ritualistic drumming; mutilated samples; haunting pads; and heaps of bizarre, shifting dissonance. You are kind of hearing the same type of stuff throughout the entire 25 minutes, however, everything is consistently moving, pulsating, and changing with hypnotic fervor, so it never feels repetitive or boring. The mix is so thick, and so much happening within that it is impossible to actively follow it all; it's best to just relax, close yourself off from the world and let your subconscious receive and be dismantled by it. I wouldn't say that this is expertly programmed or even necessarily terribly thought out or coherent; instead the beauty of this is that Arabi has channeled pure, unrefined, feral chaos (and I mean this in a sincere fashion, not just in the sense of someone making a cacophony of random pointless noises and squelches which is also "chaos"), and upon listening, one can actively feel oneself descend into it with no protective measures.

Bad stuff:
- Mix could be cleaner and the ritual drumming stronger and more powerful.

Summary:
This is certainly on the more experimental and interesting side of the dark ambient spectrum. I would definitely recommend this to fans of Aural Hypnox and the like, and those into more ambient PE and death industrial like Steel Hook Prostheses and Megaptera. The length is seemingly a bit short for a release, but I find that 25 minutes of this is the perfect duration. This is a free digital release, so don't pass it up.

Overall Rating: 8/10

4 comments:

Marwinsing said...

I smell a blatant (and pretty poor)take on Inade's Colliding Dimensions here. Fail. Is Dark Ambient becoming House or Disco? Or are the kidz steering it in that direction? Eek. Now where was that early Maeror Tri I had on?

woundsoftheearth said...

A poor take on a 4CD live collection? and this release being analogous to house? I don't follow. Care to explain? I'm curious

Marwinsing said...

Within the first third is a direct lift off one of the early tracks of CD1. I know because that Inade one's a special.

Analogous to house in that one just tires of it quickly. Just another opinion. I shan't harp on the BM growls and all the rest because he has a few sweet moments.

Maybe I'm just being too critical this week heh but your site rocks.

woundsoftheearth said...

Hmm...thanks for the tip, I'll check it out. I fuckin hate when bands lift a big portion of another track and it's immediately recognizable.

I get what you mean on the house thing. Very few bands are really doing anything of note with the style. Too much stuff is all simplistic drones or random noises ("experimental"). No one is really taking the stuff Raison or Atrium or Desiderii or whomever did and building on it using modern tools/techniques and taking it somewhere new, or maybe not even new, just somewhere...equally epic. So much of it is way too simplistic and straight forward.

Regardless, thanks for the comments and glad you like the site!!